


The very first scar is the best of intentions

by tawg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, a gen kind of slash, great blind sassy exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 01:14:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sam's soul is returned to him, he realises that he is not alone in his body. He turns to Cas for answers. Castiel provides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The very first scar is the best of intentions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isupportahooker](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=isupportahooker).



Sam has dreams. He is flying without moving. There are universes unfolding around him. There is a sense of a vast space that is filled with objects. Life, potential, more items of beauty in the darkness than can be counted. But Sam can count them. He can count them and feel them as if they were his own body and love them because there is so much love inside him that it radiates out, bold wavelengths, singing out across the everything.

And then there is light.

Sam wakes up with spots before his eyes, gasping for breath and covered in sweat. He hasn’t told Dean about the dreams. Doesn’t have words for the feeling of something draining away from his skin and pooling beneath his ribs. Dean thinks that nightmares are a good thing, a sign of humanity, another scar to accompany yet another wound. Even when they were transitioning from children to teens, Dean told Sam that his dreams would make him strong – good dreams were the hope and bad dreams were the memory, “and you need both of them, Sammy.”

But Sam is pretty sure that these dreams are nothing that he needs.

He’s pretty sure they’re not dreams.

He sits up in bed with a gasp, sleep rumpled clothes and his mind is spinning. He can still feel it, the singing ebb under his skin. It fades now to desperation, to fear. It is too much to ask that he feel safe in his own body after all of these years. Ridiculous to think that he could trust himself. The week of settling back into his soul, of staggered steps and clenched fists has been a dangerous indulgence.

“Uh, Cas?” Sam sits on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees and his hands clasped below his chin. He never used to have a pose for prayer, had always just let his words to God float up and away from him in quiet moments. But a lifetime of dealing with the supernatural has taught him the importance of ceremony. He tells himself that maybe angels only hear a prayer if you do it a certain way, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. “Cas, I need to talk to you. If you have a moment..? Amen.”

He’s glad that Dean isn’t around to hear his stuttering embarrassment of a call down the wire. Dean has an easy way with angels that Sam suspects comes from a mix of anger and ignorance. It’s hard to strut and mock and make demands when every time you see an angel you also see the battles and the legends and the righteous fury. Sam can remember lying on the floor with his blood burning, his mouth gasping sickly for oxygen and his chest empty of lungs. Wondering how long it really took for a grown human to suffocate, wondering how long Zachariah could drag those moments out. A lifetime, probably. More than that.

Sam likes to think of Castiel as a friend but he’s aware that he may be fooling himself. He can remember Dean, beaten and broken, held up by a falling angel with blood on his hands. And Dean is the Winchester that Cas likes. Sam feels his stomach lurch. He can make anyone like him, he’s sure. He can make anyone fear him, even Castiel. He can-

“Sam.”

Sam starts, climbs to his feet and runs his hands through his hair. He feels the moment when Castiel stops staring at him and starts taking in the details of their surroundings. Castiel’s attention doesn’t shift though. Sam can feel Castiel’s curiosity in his pulse, in the stretch of muscles, in the dust worked into the carpet and the faded colours of the curtains and the musty smell of the air, the way it sticks in Sam’s lungs-

“Cas,” Sam replies, and the name is a gasp and a sigh. Everything too bright and too strong and Sam can feel the world as a speck of dust and darkness beneath his feet. Can feel the size and the width of his hands and the pull to something bigger and greater, casting shadows over everything and Sam is a tower blocking out the sun. _Let there be-_

Cas snatches a dirty bowl off the table and throws it at Sam, whipping it through the air faster than the eye can follow but Sam raises his hands to catch it, has to lift them higher to protect his face when the bowl explodes into cheap ceramic dust before it reaches him. Except it did reach him, Sam had felt the patter of impact and the twist of energy that obliterated the bowl. Sam has moments like these, moments of shifting and responding without moving at all. Hands that are unseen and unknown – pressing, changing, breaking.

Sam is panting, his body is thrumming and the entire room is shaking with exhaustion and hunger. Castiel is a rock, hard and immoveable, and his eyes are the colour of the sea before it was ever contaminated with life. Sam remembers it, remembers the shape of stars before there was ever a sky to hang them in and he sees that light before him now, sees hope and destruction but mostly he sees power, he craves it.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asks, his voice pulled so tight with the need to control that it shakes, twists in the bindings he tries to wrap around it.

Castiel is silent, the pressure of his eyes lessening and Sam can feel the angel pulling away, creating a distance. A shift backwards that has nothing to do with the physical plane and Sam has only known Cas to retreat from a battle out of a need to escape – a need to stay alive or to eject himself from emotions that he doesn’t want or understand. Sam is no physical threat – Castiel’s sword would be out and at his throat in an instant.

A quiet question that silences that beehive thrum of energy in the room. “What did you do to me?”

Castiel looks away then, looks down at the Formica table top – a leafy pattern in green and purple that says a lot about the nineties, the language of motel rooms and Sam is completely fluent. He wonders what Castiel sees in the pattern, if he can see the pattern at all.

“A human body cannot live without a soul,” Castiel eventually replies. 

“I did,” Sam says, though his tongue feels thick in his mouth. His throat is closing over and he has to choke out the words, “I lived without one for over a year.”

Castiel has apparently found the meaning of all life in the table top. “Bodies need something to hold them together. They need energy.”

Sam’s blood hums, his muscles tense and relax. A good hunter knows that there are times when you can’t run. Sam suspects that Castiel would prefer it if Sam ran and that’s what makes him hold his ground despite the dread threading up his rib cage like thick, black vines. “What did you put in me?”

Castiel looks up at Sam then, his face still angled at the table but those hard eyes that are so empty of humanity, those slices of blue and black and white freeze Sam in place. Bad news written all over them and Sam’s instincts to flee or fight are raging a battle in his bloodstream.

“Grace.”

It’s that moment in the storage locker on a hill of dogs all over again, surrounded by air and nothing inside him that can breathe it in. Sam feels dizzy, feels a moment of beautiful disconnect from his body.

“Yours,” his voice says from a distance. “Tell me it was yours.”

“I would have burned you up from the inside,” Castiel replies, his voice fracturing and Sam can see the wavelengths of noise. “Being a vessel is very specific.”

Sam’s eyes slide closed. He can’t tell which way is up but without sight he can’t tell if he’s falling at all. All that time. All that time trying to get away from Lucifer, trying to escape the fate of having Lucifer inside him, possessing him. All of that time, and energy, and promise-making. And then, of all people...

“Lucifer is still in his cage, and you are out.” Castiel’s voice is hard all the way through, sharp at the edges. “It was the best possible solution and it kept you alive.”

And suddenly the flame in Sam dies out, he sags, feels heavy and tired and so full inside, so full that it numbs him. “I was just so hopeful,” Sam says. He sinks back down onto the bed, tips his head back on his shoulders, his face blank and bare to the ceiling and all of the judgement from above for his foolishness. “I thought that maybe I’d done enough. I got out of hell, I got my soul back. I could stop being a monster.”

He doesn’t hear Castiel move, doesn’t feel it now that his insides are asleep, but there is a hand in his hair and a voice close by, quiet and honest. “You have never been a monster, Sam.”

Sam’s voice is raw and tired when he speaks. “It never occurred to you that putting the power of an angel inside someone with my history for bad decisions might be a poor choice?”

“No,” Castiel replies, and the honesty is like a hand gripping his jaw. “You have learned to understand every other ability thrown at you. This will be no different.”

“But I don’t know how,” a plaintive and pitiful whine. A childish complaint, and it’s been so long since Sam has been a child. Castiel’s hand resting on the top of Sam’s head is like having his senses shuttered at last, is like being lowered into a cave of zen calm. Sam can be small and pathetic here because in the eyes of an angel surely everything must be small and pathetic. And then Castiel’s thumb strokes over a lock of hair and that thought bubbles and pops and becomes nothing. Sam can be small and pathetic here because there is a pocket of existence where he is not required to be strong. “I don’t know how to control something like this.”

“You can’t,” Castiel replies, and from his lips it sounds so simple. The words hang in the air and in their shape Sam can see the wholeness of grace, of soul. It is not like hands or feet, like words or temper. Even more erratic than a heartbeat. Though Lucifer is the all-encompassing nemesis, this fragment of his essence is not a minion that can be slain, it is not a horse that can be broken and trained, can be made lame and then put out to pasture.

Across the room, a window twists in its frame, the glass cracks with a sharp sound as Sam sucks in a struggling, shuddering breath.

Castiel crouches beside Sam, the chest of that tiny body that contains something so large and so fearsome all of an inch away from the line of Sam’s thigh. His hand falls from the crown of Sam’s head and Sam’s senses are flooded with everything. With light, with sound, with regret, with hope, with the malleable and tempting flow of time. With the settling of dust and the shift of material. With the untraceable air currents in the room and the flex of things unseen. Castiel’s form is a heat so hot that it feels like an ice burn through the thick and dirty denim of an old pair of jeans. 

“Don’t deny this,” Castiel instructs, but Sam doesn’t know how to do anything but fight against this change. The bowl reforms on the floor. The hard line of a knife sags and melts against the rose coloured quilt on Dean’s bed. Water freezes in the pipes and the porcelain of the sink bubbles with life. Sam feels wetness on his face, tears that are the result of being completely overwhelmed. Tears that are familiar because Sam has been suffocating for his entire life and now he has lungs, now he has gills and the ocean that was drowning him is giving him life. He shakes, the light overhead flickers, the carpet is now grass and Sam can hear it growing, Castiel’s hand is on his knee and Sam can see with absurd clarity that his entire existence comes down to that clumsy arrangement of bone and muscle and blood and skin that is in agony beneath the cruel weight of a comforting touch.

“I can’t,” Sam chokes out, and his voice makes the light globe explode, makes the room dance with electricity. The television comes on and Sam can feel Castiel’s impatient, motionless twitch turn it off. Sam’s mobile phone rings with the garbled static of every ringtone he has clamouring to be heard at once and Sam can feel Castiel’s annoyance flatten the sound.

“This is what you are now,” Castiel says, and though his voice is flat and impatient Sam can hear every other inflection in it, all of the tones that are beyond the range of human hearing. There is nothing distant or cruel in Castiel’s voice. An absurd amount of confidence considering Sam is going to pieces, a laughable hopefulness in this creature who is so far from hope, who has fallen and died, and knew resurrection only so he could know rejection. There is rebellion in heaven and Sam can hear the voices of angels, angels wondering if perhaps there is life for them after death. Angels praying to Castiel and yet their words go unheeded because Castiel is kneeling in the grass at Sam’s feet, because the weight of his hand that is agony and ecstasy is holding Sam’s entire world together. 

The ground twists beneath them, the uncountable animals that have died as a part of life, whose decomposition has built the very world. Everything that was once alive is still defined by the ghost of its essence and Sam is breaking down and being consumed while a hill of dogs writhes amongst the feast of bones beneath them. Sam can’t breathe and after everything he is still afraid of death, is afraid of the eternity that awaits him and resents so much the eternity that is now laid before him on this petty physical plane.

The world could be made so much better. _Sam_ could be made so much better. He could tear away this perfect skin of a body reborn, could wipe away every bad memory and trace of remorse. Sam could rise from this field of death and decay, beautiful and crazed and terrible. The world would be cleansed by the fire of the pit just as he has been. Clothed in ashes and stripped of his mistakes, finally, Sam could-

Castiel leans forwards, rests his forehead against Sam’s cheek, nuzzles his nose along Sam’s jaw. “You have always been loved,” he breathes.

The words are air, the words are lungs. There is grace singing and the water-marked ceiling of the motel is replaced with the ineffable endlessness of the sky above. The taste in his mouth of strawberries, of grazed knees. The smell of sunlight and the hard perfection in Sam uncoils, boils through him until even his toes are fiery points of light, and against him Castiel is the blackness of the ocean, is the whiteness of the polar wastelands. Is a point of life so cold that he burns and the pain is good. Sam had forgotten that pain can be good.

Grace against grace and everything feels right, feels as it should be. The smallness of his body is inconsequential because it is his home once again. He is strong and he is corrupt but there is a perfection in that, there is a rightful pleasure in the power of heaven gifted to a child of clay and ash. There is peace in Castiel’s lips against his cheek. Sam’s heart has been numb for eight years, broken, but the light inside him has made everything whole, has repaired him but not replaced him. Sam turns his face towards the kiss, feels mouth against mouth and feels the ambivalence of angels as one beautiful, angry emotion. He has always been loved.

Sam breathes, the world condenses. Everything is as it should be.


End file.
